“Game of Thrones” star Emilia Clarke said she’s done taking selfies with fans, after one fan approached her while she was in the midst of a panic attack.
“I was genuinely walking through an airport and I suddenly started having what I can only believe to be a panic attack brought on by complete exhaustion,” Clarke said on Tuesday’s episode of the Table Manners podcast. “I was on my own. I was on the phone to my mom saying, ‘I feel like I
can’t breathe. I don’t know what’s going on.'”
The “Last Christmas” actress said that her mom advised her to take a seat after Clarke started crying.
“I’m there and the tears are coming out. I’m crying and crying, this guy’s like, ‘Can I get a selfie?’ And I was like, ‘I can’t breathe, I’m really sorry. Just having a minute,'” Clarke said, adding, “It was after a few moments like that where I was like, ‘I don’t know how to do this.'”
According to Clarke, going forward, she’s planning on refusing photos with fans, but will still autograph things for them.
“When you do that, you have to have an interaction with that person, as opposed to someone just going, ‘Give us a selfie, goodbye,'” Clarke said.
“It turns into, ‘what’s your name? Who am I making it out to?’ Then you have a chat and you’re actually having a truthful human-to-human thing, as opposed to it being this other thing that probably isn’t nice for them and isn’t nice to you.”
This isn’t the first time Clarke has been open about her struggles with her mental and physical health. Earlier this year, she penned an emotional essay for the New Yorker, in which she revealed she’d suffered two brain aneurysms while filming HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”
